Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) affects more than 1 in 10 people over 40 years of age, impairing patients’ mobility and quality of life. With limited treatment options, stem cell injections have been promoted as a treatment option, but evidence of efficacy from clinical trials or claims from clinics selling untested options often lacking. Even where well-designed clinical trials were performed, there was no clear consensus about the benefit of stem cell injections for KOA, likely due to the many variables at play.  

 A major source of variability comes from the cells used for injections. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), which can be isolated from e.g. fat or bone marrow, are frequently used to treat KOA in clinical studies. Using a patient's own cells reduces the risk of an immune response and any inadvertent transmission of pathogens but the quality and the therapeutic potential of MSCs varies between patients, contributing to heterogeneous treatment outcomes. Predicting MSC potency could be a powerful tool to achieve more consistent therapeutic in such therapeutic settings. 

To tackle the issue of MSC treatment heterogeneity, Sowmya Viswanathan from the Schroeder Arthritis Institute, University Health Institute, Toronto, Canada, along with colleagues performed a long-term follow-up to a Health Canada-authorized phase I/IIa clinical trial (NCT02351011) with KOA patients receiving MSC injections, whereby the MSCs were derived from the patients’ own bone marrow. The work was published today in Stem Cell Reports.

U-M researchers conducted the largest U.S. trial to determine effective cooling durations for patients who have undergone an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

JMIR Publications, a leading open-access digital health research publisher, has partnered with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMass Chan) on an Open Access publishing subscription

Hollings researchers have identified five critical care steps that can help patients with advanced head and neck cancer begin radiation within the recommended six weeks after surgery. Led by Hollings head and neck surgical oncologist Evan Graboyes, M.D., the study found that patients who completed four or five of these milestones had a 90% rate of starting radiation on time, compared with just 10% among those who completed one or no care steps. The findings provide cancer centers with practical targets for improving coordination across the many specialists involved in head and neck cancer care and helping patients receive lifesaving treatment without unnecessary delays.

Natalie Lui, MD, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Thoracic Surgery) at the Stanford School of Medicine, has been awarded a multi-year research project grant (R01) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study and develop a molecular imaging agent for localizing (or identifying) lung cancer tumors during surgery. 

Telemedicine commonly uses video calls to reach patients near and far, but the technology limits what senses caregivers can use during their evaluation. Dr. Pijuan Yu and his collaborators at Texas A&M University are seeking to go beyond telemedicine’s use of audio and video. They want to add an entirely new dimension: touch.

Locating small lung tumors located deep within the lungs remains challenging, as they need to be navigated through a complex network of tiny airways. Existing AI systems trained on incomplete human annotations may also fail to identify peripheral airways that were omitted from the training labels. Researchers from Pusan National University developed a novel AI framework, ASTRA-Net, which helps recover previously overlooked peripheral airways—potentially enabling more accurate bronchoscopy maps for better lung cancer diagnosis.